Introduction
One of the genres I am very interested in is the making of music for
films. So for this corpus I have chosen to compare two of the greatest
film music composers of all time: John Williams and Hans Zimmer. John
Williams is the biggest film music composer of the last decades of the
20th century. His music was used in films like Star Wars, Indiana Jones,
Superman, Jaws, Jurassic Park, E.T. the Extra-Terrestrial, Schindler’s
List, Home Alone and Harry Potter. Hans Zimmer is the biggest composer
of the 21st century. His repertoire contains Gladiator, Pearl Harbor,
Pirates of the Caribbean, The Last Samurai, Madagascar, The Da Vinci
Code, Kung Fu Panda, The Dark Knight-trilogie, Sherlock Holmes,
Inception, Man of Steel, Interstellar, Dunkirk and The Lion King. The
aim of this project is to compare these two great composers and to see
if they have similarities or if they are very different. For this I will
use the “This is” of both artist on spotify. The playlist of John
Williams contains 50 songs and the playlist of Hans Zimmer contains 70
songs.
Chromagram of star wars main theme
Chromagram of the main theme of Star Wars
The chromagram is as can be expected from the star wars main theme.
The song is very explosive and energetic with a lot of instruments. This
makes the chromagram hard to read. The chromagram of cornfield chase is
a lot more readable than the chromagram of the star wars theme. This is
because there are a lot more pauses and it is mainly one repeating
melody/ sound. For example the piano at 34 seconds is clearly seen in
the E. The main difference between the two chromagrams is the
readability. The Star Wars theme is so bombastic and this makes the
chromagram to hard to read. On the other side of the spectrum there is
the calm and slowly building cornfield chase which is very readable.